


for the ones who are left behind

by joltik



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Depression, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Memory Loss, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 02:09:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13354284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joltik/pseuds/joltik
Summary: When someone leaves your life, those exits are not made equal. And when people grieve, the amount of grief they feel might be the same, but how they feel, what they do in their grief...that can be wildly, drastically different.





	for the ones who are left behind

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea what i'm doing.
> 
> this uhhh should end up being six (short) chapters long - the first three dealing w/ lucretia, barry, and taako after lup's disappearance but before That Thing lucretia did, and then three other things i had in mind later on
> 
> well, maybe.
> 
> should be canon compliant except for the poly. this kind of evolved from a thought of "what if lucretia was heavily motivated in her actions by lup's disapperane" into a sort of character/relationship study of the people who loved lup most (in this scenario, anyway) and different modes of grief

“Back soon.”

Truth to be told, Lucretia hadn’t looked at the note since the day of Lup’s disappearance. She hadn’t needed to; she remembered exactly what it had looked like, down to the minute details. The little peculiarities of Lup’s handwriting -- the o’s written with loops, even though it wasn’t cursive, the dark red ink she had used, the fading at the end as she ran out of ink, the faint flush of her lipstick on the edges of the page. Lucretia might as well have tattooed it to the inside of her eyelids.

Lucretia had largely locked herself away in her room since it became clear she was missing, with only Fisher for company. She knew, of course, that the others were surely taking it hard as well, especially Barry and Taako. Magnus came by her room occasionally, telling her about their searches, trying to convince her to eat, sleep. She didn’t want to.

At first, she had been depressed, despondent. Now, Lucretia was planning, painstakingly - taking notes upon notes, researching, duplicating her records so that the only copy wouldn’t be destroyed when she fed it to Fisher.

The others hung onto the hope that Lup was alive, that Lup was...intact. Well, Taako seemed to be more cynical, more of a depressed bastard like her. He slept more than before, as if he were sleeping for both him and Lup, even though elves didn’t need to sleep. And Taako, always hesitant to let others in, started shutting them out more than he had in decades. But they all had their own ways of processing their grief.

But Lucretia...she couldn’t just believe that Lup would be okay. She had been against Lup becoming a lich - it had actually caused one of the biggest fights of their relationship, and Lucretia had barely been able to pull herself together to give her a perfect day. It had also caused tension between her and Barry, when before the had always been able to coexist in their love for Lup before.

“Hey...it’s fine, see?” Lup had said a few days after the successful ritual. “I know you were worried. But I’m still me. Still the same Lup as always, lich or no.”

“Mm.”

“You were worried, and your concerns were valid. And I...probably should’ve been more sensitive about that. Sorry, Luce…”

“You already apologized,” Lucretia said, looking away, down at her own hands.

“I don’t apologize often,” Lup said, shrugging. “Might ‘s well make it clear I mean it when I do, you feel? I hurt you, and that was pretty fucked up of me. But…”

“But you were gonna do it either way.”

“Right, yeah. ‘Cuz I was right. I’m still the same Lup, and I will always be your Lup,” she said, wrapping her arms around Lucretia’s waist from behind. “‘s long as I have you and Bar and that dumbass brother of mine to anchor me, I’ll still always be the same Lup I’ve always been.”

“I don’t know,” Lucretia said, holding Lup’s hand near her mouth, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “You could be a Lup who doesn’t hog all the blankets at night, every night. I wouldn’t mind that.”

Lup laughed. “Of course not. Impossible, absolutely never gonna happen.” 

 

* * *

 

“I don’t know what to fucking do anymore,” Lup said to her one day, a few weeks before her disappearance. “This feels wrong. Just fucking...sitting around like this, not doing anything.”

‘You were the one who suggested this,’ Lucretia did not say, felt guilty for even thinking even if she had been opposed to the plan in the first place. “It does.”

“I feel like...I should be doing _something_. Should go find mine, at least, and then...I don’t know. If I destroy it, that’d defeat the whole purpose of making them in the first place. But I feel like I gotta do something to stop it from hurting people. Since it’s my fault.”

Lup looked uncharacteristically open, wounded. Lucretia’s heart bled for her. “It’s not your fault, not any more than any of the rest of us.”

“We were the ones who suggested it, remember?” Lup said, and Lucretia felt slightly guilty for having thought the same thing. “Me and Barry.”

“But you didn’t expect it to go like this. You...did what you thought was right,” Lucretia said, the weight of her disagreement still heavy in the air.

“I feel responsible, though. You might’ve been right on this one, Lucy.”

In arguments, it was rare for Lup to concede to being wrong. Somehow, Lucretia found it hard to be happy about it in this case.

 

* * *

 

“I just..don’t want this to be my legacy, y’know? That’s like...the one idea I can’t bear.” She paused. “Although I guess it’s not really a legacy if no one else knew it was us, huh?”

 

* * *

 

Lucretia was going to fix this. For everyone. For Lup.

If no one could remember the Relics, that would limit the amount of damage they could do. Lucretia would then be free to find them and gather them, and while she was doing that she could look for Lup. See if she was still alive, somewhere. Find her, if she was in lich form. Make sure she was still intact. Still Lup.

If she wasn’t...she didn’t really want to think about that. Not until she had to. But if nothing else, she needed to know what had happened to her.

She could spare her friends from this. They wouldn’t know, and so they couldn’t be hurt by this reality they had wrought. And Lucretia would fix this, by herself, and she would gather all seven Relics and stop the Hunger when it came.

It was the least she could do for Lup.


End file.
